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Old February 19th, 2018 #1
alex revision
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Default Hubble Sees Neptune's Mysterious Shrinking Storm

Hubble Sees Neptune's Mysterious Shrinking Storm


Three billion miles away on the farthest known major planet in our solar system, an ominous, dark storm – once big enough to stretch across the Atlantic Ocean from Boston to Portugal – is shrinking out of existence as seen in pictures of Neptune taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

Immense dark storms on Neptune were first discovered in the late 1980s by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft. Since then, only Hubble has had the sharpness in blue light to track these elusive features that have played a game of peek-a-boo over the years. Hubble found two dark storms that appeared in the mid-1990s and then vanished. This latest storm was first seen in 2015, but is now shrinking.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard...hrinking-storm
 
Old February 21st, 2018 #2
Ray Allan
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Neptune and Uranus deserve another space mission. The only spacecraft to visit either planet was Voyager 2, flying by Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989. NASA has been discussing and studying another flyby-plus-atmospheric entry probes for both planets, and also orbiters, but nothing has been approved or funded yet. Good launch windows for both planets occur in the late 2020s to early 2030s. These are the two remaining major planets that have not had orbiter probes. The most recent was Cassini-Saturn which ended its 20-year mission in September 2017. Neptune in particular would be an interesting destination. Its 28-degree axial tilt is similar to Earth's, creating seasons, except they are 40 years long on Neptune during its 164-year orbit around the Sun. It has the highest wind speeds in the Solar System, up to 1,300 mph. Neptune's largest moon Triton is bigger than Pluto, has huge nitrogen geysers and orbits in the opposite direction of Neptune's rotation, called a retrograde orbit, suggesting it was captured by Neptune's gravity.

https://space-facts.com/neptune/
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Last edited by Ray Allan; February 21st, 2018 at 02:48 AM.
 
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